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Indigenous Feminisms Across the World, Part 1
An issue of: Meridians

Rooted in activism, creative works, and epistemic innovation within and across hemispheric Indigenous politics, economies, histories, and peoples, the articles in this special issue expose, challenge, and resist contemporary (i.e., settler) colonial realities. Keeping with Meridians‘ mission, the contributors explore forms and meanings of resistance and activist strategies within contemporary feminisms.
Issue Editor: Basuli Deb

The Shape of Trans Yet to Come
An issue of: TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

This special double issue celebrates the tenth anniversary of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly by reflecting on the journey from the inaugural issue, “Postposttranssexual,” to now. In this current issue, “The Shape of Trans Yet to Come,” contributors meditate on the current state of the trans studies field and speculate on the directions and conversations in our future.
Issue Editors: Abe Weil, Francisco J. Galarte, Jules Gill-Peterson

Polarization, Politics, and Health in the United States
An issue of: Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law

Contributors to this special issue examine how partisanship and polarization—which are at their highest in 150 years—shape health policy and politics in the United States. Highlighting examples such as the Affordable Care Act and the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors explore how political struggles over health care laws are fought on increasingly partisan laws; how partisan conflict reshapes a law’s implementation and post-enactment political trajectory; how polarization expands the scope of conflict to a wider set of institutions and issues; how partisanship shapes Americans’ health behaviors and, in some cases, impacts their health outcomes; and how partisanship can widen differences in state health policies.
Editor: Jonathan Oberlander

Reproductive Racial Capitalism
An issue of: History of the Present

Contributors to this special issue explore the histories and afterlives of hereditary racial slavery and the radical refusals of its logics, arguing that contemporary racial capitalism is always already reproductive. The authors demonstrate that reproductive labor and the experiences of conception, gestation, parturition, and childrearing are the heart and engine of both slave racial capitalism and contemporary forms of reproductive racial capitalism. At the same time, the authors assert, reproductive labor and experiences are also the sites from which reproductive racial capitalism and its exploitative conditions have been resisted, are currently being challenged, and might still be altogether refused.
Issue Editors: Jennifer L. Morgan, Alys Eve Weinbaum

Labor and Science
An issue of: Labor

This special issue covers the intimate connections between labor history and the history of science, from the “labor” in laboratory to the “science” in scientific management. Given the pressing scholarly and political questions these two historical subfields share, contributors seek to approach scientific knowledge production as a variety of work—one effectively analyzed through the methodologies and questions of labor history.
Issue Editors: Seth Rockman, Lissa Roberts, Alexandra Hui

the good life in late-socialist asia: aspirations, politics, and possibilities
An issue of: positions

Contributors to this special issue examine the notion of “the good life” and its influence on late socialist social life through the perspectives of communities living amid political economic transformation across China, Laos, and Vietnam. The essays feature ethnographic analyses of diverse social domains—from pop culture, religion, and consumption to environmental discourses and philanthropic activities—to reveal how the contradictions of late socialism limit the possibilities of living well together and the moral agency of people negotiating seemingly incommensurable value frameworks and social orders.
Issue Editors: Minh T. N. Nguyen, Phill Wilcox, Jake Lin

Indigenous Responses to Disease: Ethnohistory inspired by COVID
An issue of: Ethnohistory

Contributors to this special issue explore how Indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced and responded to disease across time. Inspired by the global struggle with COVID-19, the authors reveal the transhistorical dimension of disease and its impact on the Americas.
Editors: Denise I. Bossy, Robert C. Schwaller

Crisis Theory
An issue of: South Atlantic Quarterly

This special issue covers the challenges of theorizing the present through the notion of crisis. Analyzing different incidents of contemporary political upheaval to examine the various temporal forms constitutive of the present, the authors argue that temporalities of crisis must be understood not simply as punctual events but as longer and more complex durational rhythms exemplified by ongoing racial and colonial histories.
Issue Editor: Eugene Brennan

Visual Culture Issue
An issue of: New German Critique

In this special issue, contributors explore the interface of screens, photography, film, and visual documentation in popular culture. Topics covered include an early media genealogy of screen culture in early twentieth-century Weimar; Adorno’s rare reflections on architecture and the possibility of a collective “good life” in postwar Germany; documentation and its shortcomings in Austrian attempts to memorialize the war; the uncanny photos of abandoned Jewish homes under Nazism; the culture industry’s ongoing fascination with Nazism; and the poetics of screenwriting among German authors in the postwar era.
Editor: NGC Editorial Collective

Feminists Confront State Violence
An issue of: Radical History Review

Contributors to this special issue examine the state’s capacity to affirm life given its structural investments in violence, paying specific attention to how activists theorize and devise strategies to win redress from extant institutions. The authors document the ways feminists have negotiated a fundamental contradiction, asking how and why one makes demands for the equitable distribution of care, safety, and life in a state that inequitably distributes violence, immiseration, and death. Altogether, the essays in this issue provide an archival tool kit of Black, abolitionist, anarchist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist feminist strategies to radically remake worlds inside this one.
Issue Editors: Anne Gray Fischer, Sara Matthiesen, Marisol LeBrón

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Pandemic Histories: South Asian/Indian Ocean Studies, Middle East and North Africa

An issue of: History of the Present

This special issue, titled as a conceit and a provocation, brings together South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa to challenge the conception that the Global South is either a place of historical failure or a site where theory is implemented. The authors present an alternative conceptual nexus of “pandemic histories” to theorize modes of historiographical thinking that defy narratives of death and detritus.

Special Issue Editors: Anjali Arondekar, Sherene Seikaly

Crisis to Catastrophe: Lineages of the Global New Right

An issue of: boundary 2

Tracing intersecting global genealogies of the new right from the United States to India, this issue focuses on the Right’s attachment to crisis and catastrophe to justify its calls to return to “traditional” social and political structures. The contributors argue that these neotraditionalist countercultural intellectual movements form the basis of global white supremacist political projects that are disseminated through a new media landscape. Articles include discussions of the right’s favored narratives of political, infrastructural, economic, and ecological crisis and precarity; its reclaiming of nativist politics; birtherist fantasies of US white supremacy; and the political vision of violence as the only remaining mechanism of collective governance available to imagined white minorities.

Special Issue Editors: Leah Feldman, Aamir R. Mufti

Peter Weiss and The Aesthetics of Resistance

An issue of: New German Critique

This special issue marks the recent English translation of the second volume of Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, also published by Duke University Press, with new, future-oriented readings of the novel. While many of the novel’s images—migrants adrift on a surveilled and fortified Mediterranean and the rise of anti-democratic, antisemitic, and racist authoritarian movements, among others—echo contemporary issues and events, the contributors present the novel as a complex text at the intersection of art, literary, and political histories with special utility for grasping the present moment. Topics include the relationship between form and formlessness in the novel, its implications for the interpretation of art, how political encounters inform the engagement of political subjects, and Weiss’s thematization of Jewish identity and left antisemitism. The issue also includes a new translation of a 1966 public exchange between Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

Special Issue Editors: Kai Evers, Julia Hell, Seth Howes

The Worlds of Southeast Asian Chinese Literature

An issue of: Prism

Contributors to this special issue examine a wide-ranging body of literature produced by ethnically Chinese populations of Southeast Asia. While much previous work on Chinese literature from that region has tended to focus on literature from Malaysia and former British Malaya, and particularly Chinese-language literature, the authors also consider literature from regions that are now Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The issue features analyses of works written in various Sinitic languages and creoles by authors with links to diasporic or post-diasporic Chinese communities. The contributors to the issue propose a set of interpretive methodologies for analyzing this post-national cultural formation, including inter-imperiality, posthumanism, and mesology—the study of the mutual relationships between living creatures and their biological, social, and environmental surroundings. To this end, the authors examine not only canonical works but also genres that have often received less critical attention such as popular literature, flash fiction, genre fiction, and Sino-Malay poetry. 

Special Issue Editors: Cheow Thia Chan, Carlos Rojas

Fashion’s Borders

An issue of: English Language Notes

Contributors to this special issue explore the long global history of fashion, tracing its movement across cultural, national, and political borders. “Fashion,” write the editors in their introduction, “is the cultural medium through which borders shift and move—in which place can be understood as a state of mind or a geographic location.” Topics include wartime capitalism as captured in Mollie Panter-Downes’s “Letter from London,” the significance of Emily Dickinson’s multicolored woolen shawl, an examination of social privilege and liberal humanism through the writings of E. M. Forster, Afro-Brazilian fashion in Candomblé, and a critique of the global clothing chain through Christine Duvergé’s The Lives of Loréna (Les Vies de Loréna). Through their research, the authors examine fashion’s articulations of the relation among the local, the national, and the global, as well as the human experience of interacting with the fashion industry in one national context while living in a globalized world.

Special Issue Editors: Jane Garrity, Celia Marshik

The Science of Sex Itself

An issue of: GLQ

In this special issue, contributors trace how sexual scientific thought circulated throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how that thought continues to shape sexuality. The authors situate the science of sex within a broader context of sexuality studies, which examines the social, psychological, and political aspects of desires, acts, identities, and sexology. Articles—addressing topics such as early gender clinics and transsexual etiology; the taxonomy of queer identities; and blackness and sexology—examine the current and historical ways in which racial science and colonial knowledge constitute sexual science as an amorphous object, one with a problematically vast reach that buttresses racial hierarchy and undergirds colonial infrastructures. The authors urge readers to explore how the taxonomies of sexual science structure identitarian frameworks of gender and sexuality.

Special Issue Editors: Benjamin Kahan, Greta LaFleur

Psychoanalysis and Solidarity

An issue of: differences

Freud’s earliest hysterical analyses reported a shared grievance about psychoanalysis: while their individual suffering was conditioned by social circumstances, Freud could not “alter these in any way.” If psychic illness is tied to repressive external conditions that the psychoanalyst cannot change, how can a method circumscribed to the individual’s inner life offer liberation, even cure? Motivated by the hysteric’s desire for a better life and Freud’s commitment to our intersubjectivity in common, contributors to this special issue consider psychoanalysis as a political project that holds open the space of collective action—from the analyst’s couch to the picket line, from guerrilla psychoanalysis in revolutionary Algeria and Argentina to clinical treatment for the symptomatology of exile and homelessness. Contributors construct, critique, historicize, and reimagine psychoanalysis as grounds for universal solidarity.

Special Issue Editor: Michelle Rada

Alternatives to the Anthropocene

An issue of: Radical History Review

For more than forty-five years, Radical History Review has stood at the point where rigorous historical scholarship and active political engagement converge. The journal is edited by a collective of historians with diverse backgrounds, research interests, and professional perspectives. Articles in RHR address issues of gender, race, sexuality, imperialism, and class, stretching the boundaries of historical analysis to explore Western and non-Western histories. RHR includes sections devoted to public history and the art of teaching as well as reviews of a wide range of media—from books to television and from websites to museum exhibitions—thus celebrating the vast potential for historical learning in the twenty-first century.

Special Issue Editors: Ashley Dawson, A. Naomi Paik

Urbanism Beyond the City

An issue of: Public Culture

This special issue features a new generation of urban analysts exploring and redefining the classic concept of “the City.” Looking at densities in places that are not cities, the authors examine avant-garde recombination on the frontlines of urban survival and minor public cultures just adjacent to major canonic forms. They study textured forms of solidarity emerging through informality in Miami, Cape Town, Mumbai, Oakland, Jerusalem, São Paolo, and beyond. The issue’s investigation of new methods for supporting majoritarian futures highlights lively interdependencies that take always-multiple, ever-morphing forms and expand our capacity to better inhabit the planet we share.

Special Issue Editors: Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Erica Robles-Anderson

Reading for Infrastructure: Worlds Made and Broken

An issue of: Social Text

This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays titled Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind.

Special Issue Editors: Adriana Johnson, Daniel Nemser

Form and Medium

An issue of: Novel

Contributors to this special issue explore the idea that novels are both material and conceptual, with doubled associations of material form and the forms of narrative/narration, where narrative form and physical medium influence and construct each other. The authors are interested in how the concept of form itself becomes a contested set of possibilities, both material and textual. Novels can be variously assembled and disassembled, the authors argue, and their forms cohere and disperse, alive to the transformations in material—and now digital—culture.

Special Issue Editor(s): Penny Fielding, Andrew Taylor